You don't need to hypothesize about all this, to put things in their proper context you could listen to the speech where he famously said it.
https://youtu.be/aYT2se94eU0?t=324
People only focus on that phrase since it makes a nice "talking point" and ignore all the other interesting things from Kay's talk. For example; i never knew that most of Euler's proofs were wrong w.r.t. rigorous approach as defined today!
You don't need to hypothesize about all this, to put things in their proper context you could listen to the speech where he famously said it.
https://youtu.be/aYT2se94eU0?t=324